Gypsies and the British imagination, 1807

ALONG WITH Matthew Arnold, George Borrow invented the persona of the mid-nineteenth-century “Romany rye”: the gentleman or scholar-gypsy who devoted himself to the preservation of Gypsy lore and abandoned—even for a brief time—settled English life for a nomadic sojourn among the peripatetic Gypsies, a kind of Romany fellow traveler. While clearly a fictional character in Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy,” a projection of the poet’s desire for an aloof, disinterested relationship to modern life, Borrow’s rye is part fiction and part self-invention. In two volumes of uncertain genre, Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857), Borrow tells the tale of a man who finds his identity as a wanderer and discovers in the English Gypsies he encounters along the way a template for both vagabondage and authenticity of being.

If Arnold imagines the Gypsy as an antidote to the diseases of modernity, to mindless striving and morbidity, Borrow understands the Gypsy as the antithesis of “gentility,” a term he uses to evoke the modern threat of cultural homogeneity.¹ In mid-nineteenth-century England, Borrow believed, the distinctiveness and specificity of Gypsy culture, like that of Jews and Quakers, confronted the danger of assimilation. The continued health of true English eccentricity, with which Borrow has long been associated, depended on the preservation of cultural mixture and distinctness.² Like Arnold, he conjures Gypsy life as an escape from conventional masculinity, from the exigencies of manly vocation and worldly success. Like the feminized scholar-gypsy, laden with flowers and lying languidly in his boat, Borrow’s rye evades the narrative of masculine efficacy. In Borrow, the flight from normative manliness expresses itself not only in his attraction to Gypsy life but in the very form of his literary works. He produced a kind of picaresque fiction that invites readers to expect both autobiography and bildungsroman, but delivers neither. The unclassifiable form of his writing reflects both his subject—a group of people with marginal status—and his own ambivalent relationship to ambition, accomplishment, and the hallmarks of worldly success. Borrow’s rye, who goes by the name of Lavengro, meaning “word master” in Romani, differs from Arnold’s scholar-gypsy in forming his deepest attachment to British Gypsies by way of their language. The Romany evoke for him the world of philological exploration and the fantasy of an originary tongue. Borrow’s Gypsies stand, above all, for linguistic cosmopolitanism and a dream of ultimate origins—that is, both the multiplicity and the unity of human experience. The “treasure” the Gypsies possess, writes Ian Duncan, is “encrypted in their language” and fulfills “the philologist’s true goal, the aura of an ontological lost home.”³

Borrow’s work, largely forgotten today, enjoyed a revival at the turn of the twentieth century, when he was recast as a figure dear to cultural conservatives nostalgic for a prelapserian and preindustrial England. In this version of Borrow’s pastoral narratives, the Gypsy plays the role of quaint and benign primitive, a symbol of changelessness akin to the immortal scholar-gypsy of Arnold. Ideological complexity and, often, ambiguity hover over the tradition of pastoral, as over the literary representation of Gypsies. As suggested in the discussions of John Clare and Arnold, the question of whether the Gypsy is regarded as subject to history and change is often deeply connected to the social and political sympathies of the writer and to his ability to see the Gypsy as an actual, not simply a literary, being. Borrow’s quixotic ideological stance has been hard to pin down. He has been understood as both conservative and radical, and his reputation over time has varied accordingly. His obsession with language and his attachment to both cultural specificity and cultural variety, I would argue, are the best clues to his place in the history of Gypsy representation.

George Borrow, a marginal man of letters who was nonetheless well known in his own time, made his living as a translator, a literary hack, and the author of a series of books that tend to straddle the forms of travelogue and memoir. Borrow based his early, best-selling works on his travels in Europe and elsewhere as an employee of the British and Foreign Bible Society, a Protestant organization committed to distributing Bibles to benighted peoples across the globe.⁴ The work of translating and selling Bibles made use of Borrow’s linguistic skills and militant anti-Catholicism, a passion that fueled his dislike of both the Oxford Movement and, more idiosyncratically, the gothic fiction of Walter Scott (RR 351–52). The object of this anti-Catholic wrath in Lavengro and The Romany Rye is a recurring character, to whom I will return, called the “man in black,” an itinerant priest who seems to wander the English countryside in search of converts at the behest of the pope.

It was on his travels for the Bible Society that Borrow encountered Gypsies in many lands, discovering in their customs, language, and manner of subsistence a reflection of the British Gypsy ways he knew from his boyhood rambles in the Norwich countryside. In a reversal—or perhaps parody—of the European traveler’s dependence on a Western lingua franca like English or French, Borrow’s knowledge of Romani, however rudimentary, functioned as a passport to other cultures and formed the basis of his internationalist credo. In a letter to the Bible Society, written in Moscow in 1835, Borrow describes a characteristic visit to Gypsies near Marina Rotche:

[They] swarmed out from their tents … and surrounded me.… I addressed them in a loud voice in the dialect of the English Gypsies.… A scream of wonder instantly arose, and welcomes and greetings were poured forth in torrents of musical Romany, amongst which, however, the most pronounced cry was: ah kak mi toute karmune—“Oh, how we love you,” for at first they supposed me to be one of their brothers, who, they said, were wandering about in Turkey, China, and other parts.… Their countenances exactly resembled those of their race in England and Spain, brown, and for the most part beautiful, their eyes fiery and wildly intelligent, their hair coal-black and coarse.⁵

The Bible in Spain was Borrow’s most popular and best-received book during his lifetime, Lavengro and The Romany Rye achieving the status of respected literary works only after his death in 1881.⁶ Borrow’s biographer Michael Collie believes that the missionary aura of The Bible in Spain added to its appeal to the English public in the mid-nineteenth century and that the qualities that accounted for its fame—ostentatious but essentially fraudulent autobiographical details—explain the only moderate success of the later two works.⁷ I would speculate that Lavengro and The Romany Rye, published in the 1850s, frustrated the public’s expectation that they were reading an autobiography—whether fictional or not—that promised a teleological frame and a terminus in marriage and vocation. Set on English soil and not offered as a justifiably picaresque travelogue, these two works begin not with embarkation on a journey but with birth, genealogy, and the conundrums of physical and psychic inheritance. Unlike the various narratives of David Copperfield and Jane Eyre, Arthur Pendennis and Maggie Tulliver, Teufelsdröckh and John Stuart Mill, the story of Lavengro ends almost in medias res or, more precisely, as we shall see, in another embarkation.

The popularity of these two mock memoirs after Borrow’s death and the revival of his work at the turn of the century tell us a good deal about the trajectory of British attitudes toward and representation of Gypsies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Renewed interest in Borrow and his writings followed the publication of a two-volume biography by William Ireland Knapp in 1899 and the contemporaneous appearance of cheap editions of his works. (Between 1893 and 1914, for example, sixteen editions of Lavengro were published.)⁸ Late-nineteenth-century pastoralism and nostalgia for preindustrial England, about which Jan Marsh and others have suggestively written, assigned a particular place to the British Gypsy.⁹ The Gypsy Lore Society was itself part of this movement to preserve and revive rural folkways, music, dance, and similar antiquated cultural practices, but others also made the connection between Gypsies and an older, unspoiled England. The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who took an interest in English folk music and older musical idioms, planned—but never wrote—an opera based on Lavengro.¹⁰ Cecil Sharp, principal of the Hampstead Conservatoire of Music, collected old folksongs from Gypsy women, and Edward Thomas, another early-twentieth-century ruralist and poet, studied George Borrow and wrote Gypsy poems.¹¹ Borrow emerged as a prototype of the Romany rye and as a kind of putative godfather to those who wished to celebrate the preindustrial past. John Sampson, a leading member of the Gypsy Lore Society and librarian at the University of Liverpool, acknowledged Borrow’s centrality to the British literary tradition of Gypsy representation by naming his anthology of Gypsy references The Wind on the Heath, a phrase taken from Lavengro: “There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise the wind on the heath.”¹²

In essays written in the 1880s and 1890s, collected forty years later for an edition of selections from the works of Borrow, Leslie Stephen and George Saintsbury expound on the meaning of Borrow for the late Victorian reader.¹³ Saintsbury remarks on Borrow’s apparent lack of interest in current events, literary contemporaries, and the dramatic political changes through which he lived. “Who, as he reads [Lavengro],” Saintsbury asks, “ever thinks of what was actually going on in the very positive and prosaic England of 1824–5?”¹⁴ This absence of topicality or even contemporary detail enables the reader of the 1880s and 1890s to escape the material realities of his own time, as well as previous eras, and to revel in unreality. Stephen delights in the “half-visionary fragment of fairyland” that Lavengro occupies: “It will never be again discovered by any flesh-and-blood traveller; but, in my imaginary travels, I like to rusticate there for a time, and to feel as if the gipsy was the true possessor of the secret life, and we who travel by rail and read newspapers and consider ourselves to be sensible men of business, were but vexatious intruders upon this sweet dream.”¹⁵ In an indulgent tone, Stephen insists that Borrow was a “staunch conservative, full of good old-fashioned prejudices,” a bohemian but not in revolt against the established order.¹⁶ A “genuine tramp,” a benign dreamer in touch with a land now obliterated by modern inventions like the railroad, Borrow appears to comfort the late-nineteenth-century man of letters.

The Borrow of the fin de siècle and the early decades of the twentieth century, then, is both culturally conservative and bohemian, and, for some, the latter role took on a racier and potentially more subversive quality than Stephen allows. Augustine Birrell—essayist, passionate Borrow admirer, and sometime literary man—devoted an essay to Borrow in his collection Res Judicatae, in which he tries to define the “born Borrovian” by evoking Borrow as a kind of outlaw: “down tumbles the standard of Respectability … ; up flutters the lawless pennon of the Romany Chal [man].”¹⁷ Daydreaming under the flag of lawlessness, this species of Borrow reader escapes not just modernity but propriety and social convention. Some of the male Gypsy lorists, whose penchant for heterosexual libertinism constituted an important part of their enthusiasm for Gypsy caravanning and rambling, saw in Borrow a kindred sexual spirit. Even Theodore Watts-Dunton, whose sexuality was more complicated and ambivalent than that of his fellow lorist Augustus John, regarded Borrow as an avatar of romantic love and, in homage to the spirit of Romany female beauty, featured two stunning Gypsy women in his novel Aylwin (1898) and narrative poem The Coming of Love (1898). In his introduction to an edition of Borrow’s Wild Wales: The People, Language and Scenery (1862), Watts-Dunton characterizes this late work as lacking in glamour. He attributes the straight-laced mood of the tour of Wales and its narrative to the inhibiting presence of Borrow’s wife and stepdaughter. Because of this constraint, Watts-Dunton concludes, Borrow found it impossible “to indulge in his bohemian proclivities and equally impossible to give his readers any of those romantic coincidences … which illuminate his other works.”¹⁸ This image of Borrow as sexual bohemian is as much an invention of turn-of-the-century Borrovians as is the notion of Borrow as nostalgiabound conservative.

George Borrow’s Lavengro and The Romany Rye provide grist for the nostalgic ruralist’s mill. The bulk of Lavengro’s story, written in the first person, occupies the 1820s and evokes an England free from reform politics, industrial cities, and even railroads, save as a fantasy of the future. Jasper Petulengro, the Gypsy who becomes Lavengro’s “brother,” tells of hearing two engineers describing a “wonderful invention” that would necessitate destroying all the old roads and digging up the grain fields in order to put down “iron roads, on which people would go thundering along in vehicles pushed forward by fire and smoke” (RR 38). How, Jasper wonders, could the Gypsies pitch their tents on iron roads, protect their families from danger, find places for their cattle to graze? Numerous allusions to boxing and references to stagecoaches and inns of “times gone by” remind us that we are in the world of Pierce Egan and Thomas De Quincey and, perhaps, the earliest Dickens. Ian Duncan has observed that even Borrow’s London resembles “the rogues’ town of Nash or Defoe [more] than the imperial metropolis of Dickens and Mayhew.”¹⁹ That this should be the case, given that the works are set in the 1820s rather than the 1840s or 1850s, does not seem to prevent Borrow’s readers from detecting in them an aura of nostalgia or even anachronism. And it is as much the literary form as the temporal setting of these works that establishes their affinity with a premodern era, with the late eighteenth rather than the mid-nineteenth century.

In a statement about his creation Lavengro, Borrow touches on the resolutely picaresque and anti-bildung nature of his narrative:

The fictional and real figures whom Borrow cites convey his kinship with eighteenth-century models, but even these forerunners’ narratives, however episodic and rambling they might be, culminate in the resolution of ambition or love. Lavengro, however, retains his “gypsyism,” a way of indicating that his haphazard occupation, unfulfilled—even inchoate—romantic yearnings, and unsettled habits will shape the form as well as the substance of his life. “Gypsyism” comes to signify not just the open-endedness of the hero’s life but the rambling quality and inconclusive form of the written narrative, so the genre of the work mirrors its peripatetic subject.

Peter Brooks has suggested that the hero’s ambition in nineteenth-century texts is a latter-day version of the picaro’s scheming merely to stay alive in earlier fiction: “It may be a defining characteristic of the modern novel (as of bourgeois society) that it takes aspiration, getting ahead, seriously, rather than simply as the object of satire …, and thus it makes ambition the vehicle and emblem of Eros, that which totalizes the world as possession and progress.”²⁰ The depth and power of this modern myth was so great for nineteenth-century audiences, he goes on, that ambition constituted the very “readability” of a text, the structure by which its meaning might be created or perceived. As Brooks’s discussion implies, this myth of ambition—of “possession and progress”—was inextricably bound up with notions about the achievement of manhood.²¹ Lavengro’s relationship to the plot of masculine ambition, although familiar to the Victorian reader, ultimately eludes clarity or resolution.²² Borrow draws on elements of family romance, pastoral, and bildung, but he ultimately denies his narrative and his readers the “readability” associated with the plot of ambition.

In Lavengro, the standard Gypsy-foundling story is, not unexpectedly, fused with the plot of manhood and masculine identification, reinforcing the centrality of the Oedipal struggle to the narrative of family romance. In this book, however, as in some narratives involving heterodox femininity, the child imagines not a real parent more powerful and prestigious than his own but a true origin that is socially abased and marginal. Borrow creates a world in which the relations between parents and children generally are tenuous and the knowledge that each generation possesses of the other is murky and incomplete. “You are my son,” Lavengro’s father tells him after hearing that the boy has been devoting himself to the study of strange languages rather than the law, “but I know little of your real history” (L 175). Later, during Lavengro’s unsuccessful sojourn in London, he befriends a woman who sells apples on London Bridge and tells her that he cannot be sure that she is not his mother: “How should I make it out? [he asks] who can speak from his own knowledge to the circumstances of his birth?” (L 257). His particular sense of estrangement within his own family is inseparable from his sense of physical difference, from both his father and his older brother. His brother’s relation to him is “as light is opposed to darkness”: his brother is the “gay and rapid river,” and he is the “dark and silent lake”; his brother’s temperament is “happy, brilliant, cheerful,” and his is “sad and melancholy” (L 5). The brother is not only light and beautiful but unmistakably English: “rosy, angelic face, blue eyes, and light chestnut hair … one of those occasionally seen in England, and in England alone” (L 5).

Their father, a soldier and one-time boxer, articulates the difference between his sons in terms that impugn both Lavengro’s “racial” identity and his masculinity. Arguing with his wife, who slightly favors Lavengro, about which son would be the Jacob and which the Esau, he declares: “my first-born … is my joy and pride—the very image of myself in my youthful days, long before I fought Big Ben [a well-known boxer of the day].… As for the other … Why, he has neither my hair nor my eyes; and then his countenance! why ‘tis absolutely swarthy, God forgive me! I had almost said like that of a gypsy” (L 87). The father’s near assertion of Lavengro’s resemblance to a Gypsy reinforces the narrator’s own expression of affinity with the Romany, but puts it in the context of an Oedipal drama. Family mythology about the boxing match between the father and Big Ben becomes a leitmotif of manly ritual in the narrative, as Lavengro must box with the Gypsy Jasper Petulengro before Jasper, defeating him, offers Lavengro his sister-in-law as a mate and as Jasper himself goes on to fight “in the ring” in London. But the father’s pugilistic past is also inflected by a drama of color. The last thing the father tells Lavengro before he dies, at the very end of volume 1, concerns Big Ben: “his skin when he flung off his clothes … his skin, I say, was brown and dusky as a toad” (L 178). Lavengro’s swarthiness aligns him not only with the alien Gypsies but with his father’s enemy. His dubious manly prowess—it is his brother who resembles the youthful, vigorous father—prompts him both to test himself through physical struggle and to seek out the company of Gypsies, whose unconventional masculinity will better match his own.

An incident narrated by Lavengro in the first pages of the text introduces the idea of his apparent foreignness, linked both to racial difference and to linguistic precociousness. One day when he was a small boy, a “travelling Jew” appeared at the door of the farmhouse where Lavengro’s family dwelt. Reminiscent of other uncanny strangers (the Malaysian, for example, who suddenly lands on the “opium-eater’s” doorstep in the Lake District in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater [1822]), this old man comes and goes like an apparition and carries prophetic powers. Introducing Lavengro to the old peddler, a maid refers to the boy as slow of speech and somewhat weak in the head. The old Jew observes the child sitting on the floor and drawing “strange lines in the dust” and declares him sweet, Jewish-looking—having “all the look of one of our people’s children”—and preternaturally clever. He further judges Lavengro to be “a prophet’s child,” already able to write and engaged in tracing “holy letters” on the dusty ground (L 7–8). The old man was the only adult, Lavengro tells us, who ever formed a good opinion of him when a child. The incident of the Jewish peddler first marks Lavengro as a being whose identity cannot be explained by his obvious parentage. The old man functions as a precursor to the Gypsies, who will claim Lavengro as one of their own and will do so through the medium of an alien language. The scene mystifies knowledge of such languages, as though to suggest that it is innate and grounded in some deep racial inheritance, and it associates Lavengro with the written rather than the spoken word. The family romance of this narrative, like that of other Gypsy stories, establishes the hero as a wanderer, misfit, and potential pariah—a child whose strangeness must be explained through race.

As in a typical bildungsroman, then, the narrative launches Lavengro in search of identity and origin. What is the nature of his true lineage, in a symbolic if not a biological sense? Where does he belong and with which family? What will he become and where will he find his fortune and his mate? The early death of his brother intensifies his sense of inadequacy—“He was taken, and I was left”—and, conjoined with an Oedipal struggle displaced from father onto brother, sends Lavengro in search of a brother rather than a parent (L 73). This he finds in the shape of Jasper Petulengro, whose Romany family he encounters first on his boyhood rambles. Mrs. Petulengro’s skin, he remarks, is “dark and swarthy, like that of a toad”—like his, that is, and Big Ben’s (L 29). The Petulengro parents, impressed with Lavengro’s snake-charming talents and ability to read to them from his favorite book, Robinson Crusoe, command their own son and this boy “to be two brothers” (L 34). Although Jasper appears only sporadically in the early chapters of the narrative, his fraternal presence is a steady anchor for Lavengro’s identity—a replacement for the dead brother and an outward affirmation of his kinship with the Romany (figure 10).

The question of Lavengro’s education and vocation, like that of identity, winds through the first two books of the three-book Lavengro. Will he become a soldier, like his father; a lawyer, like the man to whom he is apprenticed; a translator of texts from the languages he studies almost compulsively? As each possibility emerges, it is either immediately scrapped or undermined, most often because the straightjacket of professionalism never suits the self-described wanderer: “from my infancy,” he writes of himself, recalling the roving child Harry Bertram in Guy Mannering, “I was accustomed to travelling and wandering” (L 9). Lavengro the narrator has difficulty keeping his early efforts at professional education in focus, as though they were eclipsed in his memory by the aliens and vagabonds who became his sometime companions. “I would fain describe him,” Lavengro says of William Taylor, the gentleman lawyer who attempted to prepare him for the law, “but figures with which he has nought to do press forward and keep him from my mind’s eye; there they pass, Spaniard and Moor, Gypsy, Turk, and livid Jew” (L 115). His ready acquisition of languages—Arabic, Danish, Hebrew, Irish, and, of course, Romani—convinces him that he might make his fortune in London as a translator, and so, after his father dies, he leaves Norwich for the metropolis. A young man’s typical journey to London ensues, and its standard features are present: riding for a hundred miles on the top of a coach, finding “dank and filthy” lodgings in a narrow street, encountering the waifs and strays of the urban scene, hawking his literary creations without success. The city swallows him for a time, offering him adequate but demeaning employment and sending him repeatedly to London Bridge in search of relief for his suicidal despair, and then it spits him out. Now an apparent failure, he will not retrace his journey back home but will wander on foot into the countryside, “leaving my subsequent movements to be determined by Providence” (L 312). Leaving the anti-Eden of London, he appears to reverse the direction of Adam and Eve’s ejection from Paradise. From this moment in the text, Lavengro’s trajectory circumvents any bid for fortune or fame and evades the ambitious plot of bildung. He has not yet, however, reached the complete “freedom from desire” that Duncan identifies as the ultimate requirement for the hero’s overall liberty in Borrow’s work.²³

Delighting in the odor of hissing horse hooves and singing a Gypsy song, Lavengro becomes a pastoral man. Protected from the world, housed by nature, and engaged in a trade that he deems “poetical,” he finds balm for his city-worn spirit. He needs only an Eve to complement his Edenic life. Isopel Berners, the mate he finds, matches his idiosyncratic and solitary being (figure 12). Alone and peripatetic, having “travelled the country melancholy,” she was born and raised in a workhouse, is immensely tall and strong for a woman (Lavengro compares her to Brunhilde, the serpent-killing Valkyrie), and knows some Romani from her life on the rural roads. Lavengro invites her to live with him and vows to teach her Armenian, a deeply romantic gesture to Lavengro, the word master, but of doubtful significance to Isopel (RR 39). They take up residence in Mumper’s Dingle and live, like any number of biblical forefathers and -mothers, as “the first occupiers of the ground” (RR 28). Not only first man and woman, Adam and Eve, they also play the roles of Abraham and Sarah, first patriarch and matriarch, especially when Lavengro coaxes the reluctant Belle to emerge from her tent and greet their visitors: “We … should consider ourselves in the light of hosts,” he urges, mimicking Abraham, “and do our best to practice the duties of hospitality” (RR 28).²⁵

The unintended consequence of Abraham and Sarah’s hospitality in Genesis, of course, is the announcement of future progeny and the begetting of a new race. Lavengro wishes for the same outcome and proposes to Belle that they leave this temporary paradise and emigrate to America, a truer Eden, where they can “settle down in some forest” and have children (RR 95). This dream of procreation notwithstanding, Lavengro will never father a new people in a new world. Frustrated by his peculiar and ambiguous manner of courtship and convinced, as others, of his madness, Belle Berners leaves him: “Isopel had deserted me, and was gone to America by herself, where, perhaps, she would marry some other person, and would bear him a progeny, who would do for him what in my dreams I had hoped my progeny would do for me” (RR 105). The pastoral dream, as well as the dream of heterosexual love, eludes him. So, too, will the redemption of his own vexed origin through reproduction. What progeny might “do for” him is give him a place in the world and a lineage of his own: not the family into which he was so confusingly born and not the Gypsies, with whom he feels a not fully authentic kinship. Belle, herself a woman with Romany affinities—she is a rootless outcast and vagabond—is distinctly not a Gypsy, and Lavengro rejects the idea of a union with Jasper’s sister-in-law Ursula. Living and working in Mumper’s Dingle convince Lavengro that he cannot sustain his Romany masquerade: “It was much more agreeable,” he concedes, “to play the gypsy or the tinker than to become either in reality” (RR 83). Belle had represented his chance to discover a third way of being, to be an outsider who discovers his own promised land.

Readers of Borrow often have claimed that the consummation that eludes Lavengro in reproducing and emigrating also escapes him in sexual matters. Puzzled over as celibate, asexual, even autistic, he appears to many to be chaste throughout his narrative.²⁶ The editor and poet W. E. Henley, one of Borrow’s greatest late-nineteenth-century fans, identifies Lavengro’s story as “entirely unsexual”—“the book does not exist in which the relations between boy and girl are more miserably misrepresented than in Lavengro and The Romany Rye”—and classifies him with other nonsexual, if chivalric, picaresque heroes, from Don Quixote to Samuel Pickwick.²⁷ What these readers neglect to see—or at least to mention—is that Lavengro’s libido is expressed through language and, in certain moments, is very much in evidence. The most extended episode of courtship, all of it conveyed through double entendres, appears in The Romany Rye, when Lavengro gives Belle a lesson in Armenian. Hovering between seduction and coercion, Lavengro’s initiation of Belle into a language to which she is indifferent comes across as badgering and overbearing, but its sexual content is not in question. After telling her that he intends to give her the longest lesson she has yet had and will teach her to conjugate an Armenian verb, she protests that she cannot bear much more. “I wish to be gentle with you,” he declares, and proceeds to teach her the verb siriel (to love), maneuvering her in the process to confess that she loves him. Not satisfied with extracting this admission, he also teases her unmercifully by pretending that the words they speak, which clearly have a personal meaning, must not be applied to their real lives. Finally reducing her to tears, he gives up the lesson and invites her to run off to America with him: “‘To America together?’ said Belle, looking full at me. ‘Yes,’ said I; ‘where we will settle down in some forest, and conjugate the verb siriel conjugally’” (RR 92–95). Whether this amounts to foreplay or is, indeed, a substitute for sex, as A. S. Byatt has speculated, Belle apparently experiences this peculiar courtship as delay and leaves the Dingle because Lavengro has waited too long to ask her to marry him (RR 103–4).²⁸ Shortly after Belle’s departure, which sends him into a state of morose brooding, he, too, leaves this pastoral paradise, an Adam leaving Eden without Eve.

Lavengro’s pastoral never fulfills its promise, either as an interlude of romantic love or, as in Shakespearean pastoral, as a temporary retreat from society that fosters renewal and a fortified return to the world. Even the possibility of joining Jasper’s people, of adopting Romany ways of living and working, proves unsatisfying, an inadequate, perhaps even a bogus, alternative to Lavengro’s wandering. The plot of the family romance remains unresolved as well, by either Lavengro’s discovering an authentic lineage—elevated or debased, Gypsy or otherwise—or his fathering a child.²⁹ It is at this point in Borrow’s two texts that his hero’s “freedom from desire”—from what Duncan calls “a complex and affective economy that … defines what are recognizably human relations”—becomes complete, or at least appears to have become so.³⁰ The formal manifestation of this ostensible absence of desire is a kind of breakdown of the narrative into episodic aimlessness, into the picaro’s meandering, a journey void of the dynamics of quest or pursuit.

After Lavengro leaves Mumper’s Dingle to go on the tramp, his adventures take him back to an older idiom and an older England. He stops at an “inn of times gone by,” expatiates on the stagecoach-men of England, and offers a paean to the wonders of staying home and traveling in his native country rather than roaming abroad (RR 141, 151, 180). Ostlers, postillions, and “boots” populate this backward-looking version of coaching days, and Lavengro the word master and sometime blacksmith fades into a depressed silence. His melancholy self-effacement has the effect, however, of allowing him to gather and reproduce the stories of others: eccentrics and solitaries he meets along the way, “traversing England from west to east” (RR 180). In these encounters, he regains something of selfhood and sense of purpose.

The most significant characters he meets share one of two things with Lavengro, either unhappiness in love or obsession with language, and thus function as doubles for the wanderer, holding up to him a mirror of his own identity and submerged, although not wholly absent, longing. He reencounters a friend, Francis Ardry, from London days. Ardry, like Lavengro a would-be literary man, has been abandoned by his lover, Annette, and swears off love. In a moment of veiled self-reflection, Lavengro inquires of Ardry if perhaps he is responsible for the failure of his romance: “did you never treat her with coldness,” he asks his friend, describing indirectly his own treatment of Belle, “and repay her marks of affectionate interest with strange fits of eccentric humor?” (RR 161). Another chance encounter introduces him to a hermit-like man who has made a thirty-five-year study of Chinese after learning the language from bits of crockery and paper that had been used to wrap tea. For ten years, he has labored to “undo the locks” of Chinese writing. Not only is the old man a fellow philologist, but he has become so because of disappointment in love:

Three more chance encounters, almost randomly represented, consolidate Lavengro’s reemerging sense of self. First, he meets a Hungarian gentleman who has had extensive experience of Gypsies in a variety of lands. Not only does the Hungarian tell Lavengro that Gypsies, whether found in Hungary, Turkey, Russia, or England, “are alike in their ways and their language” (an idea that will soon become important), but he claims to recognize Lavengro as the Romany rye talked of by all the British Gypsies he has met on his travels (RR 246). Almost without his knowledge, the identity that Lavengro seeks has been established and recognized. Next, he rediscovers the Irishman, Murtagh, who taught him Irish—“the foundation of all my acquisitions in philology”—when he was a boy. “Without you,” he tells his old teacher, “I should not have been what I am—Lavengro! which signifies a philologist” (RR 304). The encounter suggests that Lavengro need only reflect on the nature of his name, from which the essence of his identity unfolds, to understand his place in the world. Finally, in the episode that ends The Romany Rye and the narrative of Lavengro’s life, the word master meets a recruiting officer, an East India man, who tries to sign him up to fight and make his fortune in India. Lavengro inquires about the people there, and the officer replies by describing them in derogatory terms, although he uses words from their own “gibberish.” Struck momentarily dumb by the familiarity of the sounds, Lavengro stares at the officer and declares, “Why … this is the very language of Mr. Petulengro” (RR 309). Thinking him mad, the East India man recoils from Lavengro and rescinds his offer of a shilling and a soldier’s post. The colonial recruiter decides not to recruit, but our hero, drawn not by the specter of wealth or warfare but by the promise of language and brotherhood, decides to leave for the East anyway.³¹ It is not the mere exoticism of the language that attracts him but the idea of a language that, as the Hungarian gentleman had indicated, links all the Gypsies of the globe, unites the Gypsies with other peoples, and, further, seems to lend credence to the theory, tentatively offered by Lavengro, that Romani might “turn out to be the mother of all languages in the world” (L 267). The text ends with the words “I think I’ll go there,” signifying that England will not be a sufficient stage for Lavengro’s travels after all and that the ending for a true wanderer is another beginning.

By the end of The Romany Rye, Lavengro arrives at an understanding of what his life’s narrative has implied all along: his identity, his fate, and even his origin are to be discovered in words. The desire that does survive intact the disintegration of both Lavengro’s worldly ambition and his erotic longing is a compulsion to learn and use foreign languages, the more esoteric the better. Indeed, linguistic desire seems to replace all other forms, both as a substitute and as a more authentic, primary impulse. And it is through language that he experiences kinship and a sense of connection to the wider world. It takes him beyond the search for paternity and lineage—the stuff of family romance—to the discovery of fraternity, and beyond the search for home or homecoming to the discovery of arenas for adventure and knowledge outside England.

From the early episode of the Jewish peddler’s visit to Norwich and his introduction to the child Lavengro, tracing Hebrew letters in the dust, Lavengro’s attachment to words and to foreignness is clear. His name, given to him by the Petulengros, signals his primary identity—word master—and replaces his given name. In the course of Lavengro and The Romany Rye, he is never referred to as George, which, among other things, complicates the question of autobiography, although Murtaugh calls him Shorsha, presumably an Irish version of that name. He possesses no nominal identity other than “Lavengro.” If the Gypsies name him, Murtagh, by teaching him Irish, vivifies the name. The learning of languages becomes the boy’s sole pursuit. As it replaced his given name, it replaces a conventional career:

By referring to his own relationship to this “philological age,” Borrow also alludes to the place held by Romani in nineteenth-century linguistic study. The Gypsies’ language was not simply of random interest to Lavengro/Borrow or to philologists. In addition to its apparent ubiquity across the globe, which in itself fascinated early anthropologists, Romani claimed the attention of philologists because of its similarities to Indic languages. Late-eighteenth-century German philologists and their Victorian descendants, like Max Müller, regarded ancient Indian languages as central to their scholarly work, in part because of their newly perceived links to modern European languages and, more broadly, because comparative philology provided what J. W. Burrow calls “a model for different kinds of inquiry into the remote past, as an ethnological tool—a means of classifying racial families and perhaps even showing the single (or diverse) origin of the human race.”³² Philology, he continues, might prove to be “the Ariadne’s thread into pre-history.”³³ If Romani is an offshoot of an Indian language, as philologists had determined by the end of the eighteenth century, then it might provide clues to ancient history, the origin of humankind, and the links that still bound apparently disparate peoples.

The Gypsies’ language is, indeed, the hook that draws Lavengro into his lifelong preoccupation: “Of all connected with them, … their language was doubtless that which exercised the greatest influence over my imagination” (L 107). As he moves through his narrative, Romani begins to appear to him as a “picklock, an open sesame” to other languages and to the relationships among them (L 196). Like the solitary man who has labored for years to “undo the locks” of Chinese writing and perhaps even like Freud, who sought the right “collection of picklocks” to open the case of Dora, Lavengro sees in a particular artifact of human culture or experience the means of entry into a vast web of connection and coherent meaning (RR 210).³⁴ Romani opens the mysteries of linguistic correspondences: “tanner” means “sixpence,” the smallest of English coins, to the Cockney apple seller and “little child” to the Petulengros; “pannam,” London street cant for “bread,” is connected to the Latin panis, which Lavengro reckons must be linked by some unknown root word to the Romani morro or manro (L 196, 267). But Romani might also unlock the door to history. Like those nineteenth-century philologists who sought an ur-language or, at least, an “Ariadne’s thread” leading back to the beginning of human civilization, Lavengro ultimately speculates that the “language of Mr. Petulengro” might “turn out to be the mother of all languages in the world” (L 267). Language, itself the origin of Lavengro’s identity, has a parallel in Romani, the imagined originator or maternal forebear of all other languages. The history revealed is no less than that of all humankind, but it is also the individual history of Lavengro.

On the most personal level, Romani is meaningful to Lavengro as the “language of Mr. Petulengro”—that is, of his brother or, one might say, his brothers. For a man whose relations with others—his own family as well as his comrades and lovers—are hampered by reticence and even mutism (the Jewish peddler sees the boy writing, but fails to hear him speak), words themselves become agents of intimacy. It is not through speech, or the use of language as communication, that he forms connections to others, but through the knowledge and the contemplation of others’ vocabularies. In his idiosyncratic wooing of Belle Berners, the teaching of language functions as erotic expression, at least for the instructor. The flirtatious Ursula, Jasper Petulengro’s sister-in-law, is of little interest to Lavengro until she tells him a secret of the Romany tongue. When she divulges that the important word patteran, used to mean “trail,” comes from Romani for “leaf” (leaves being the way to mark a trail in the forest), he finds her especially attractive: “‘I think I never saw you look so pretty as you do now,” he tells her (RR 74). Jasper understands that this love of words, which often overwhelms or masks other kinds of desire in Lavengro, binds the Romany rye to him:

Language has a complicated relationship to the divine word in Lavengro / Borrow’s universe. Clearly an ambivalent Christian, Lavengro enters a church once in the course of his story. He finds himself there almost accidentally, led by Jasper’s wife, whose dreams of respectability draw her to Christian practice. A line from the liturgy—“I will arise, and go to my father”—evokes memories of his childhood, his parents, and his old church in Norwich. Transported back to the time when, as a child, he would fall asleep in the pews, he feels now that he has just awakened from one of those naps and that the intervening years have vanished. The power of the liturgy to erase the passage of time and the difference in place astonishes him, but he concludes that it was “the magic of the words which brought the dear enchanting past so powerfully before the mind of Lavengro … the words that were the same sonorous words of high import which had first made an impression on his childish ear in the old church” (RR 52). He is not moved by religious feeling or by a rhetoric of belief, but by a phrase that invokes “my father.” The vexed relationship between father and son, which colors all the exchanges between them in the narrative, falls away. Words open memory and recast the past as consoling and calming.

In the appendix to The Romany Rye, Borrow meditates on the uncanny power of a text to relieve depressed spirits. A Welsh preacher, one of the recurring characters in Lavengro’s tale, had been restored to equanimity in the following way:

And here it will be as well for the reader to ponder upon the means by which the Welsh preacher is relieved from his mental misery: he is not relieved by a text from the Bible, by the words of consolation from his angel-minded wife, nor by the preaching of one yet more eloquent than himself; but by a quotation made by Lavengro from the life of Mary Flanders, cut-purse and prostitute, which life Lavengro had been in the habit of reading at the stall of his old friend the apple-woman, on London Bridge, who had herself been very much addicted to the perusal of it. (RR 315)

The secular—not to say, profane—words of Daniel Defoe, which have a special place in Lavengro’s own life and bind him to the apple seller during his lonely stay in London, eventually work their incantatory magic on the preacher. Two of Defoe’s books are important to Lavengro: Robinson Crusoe (1719–1720), whose illustrations he pores over in childhood, and Moll Flanders (1722), which the apple seller reads and rereads because it gives her hope that her daughter, a transported convict like Moll, will return home like Defoe’s heroine (L 18–19, 194–95). A drawing of Crusoe’s discovery of Friday’s footprint on the island fills the child with “emotions strange and novel,” as though he recognizes his future self in Defoe’s hero, another exiled traveler and isolate who forms a bond with a non-white companion in his wanderings.³⁵ Although profane, Defoe’s works are of great personal and spiritual meaning to Lavengro, and he believes that they may be the means through which God “accomplishes his purposes” (RR 315). Furthermore, he tells us, the balm that heals might be derived not in fashionable Albermarle Street, but in the “low society” of London Bridge and from the life of an outlaw. Lavengro’s own life story—dependent on the companionship of Gypsies, a Cockney apple seller, and a woman born in a workhouse—clearly bears this out.

The antipathetic relationship between Lavengro and the peripatetic “man in black,” the Catholic priest who keeps reappearing on horseback in the narrative, also hinges on contrasting views of the importance of words and texts. The man in black, a double for both Lavengro and Borrow as a solitary and celibate traveler and missionary, ridicules both Gypsies and philologists (L 486–87). The former are illiterate and ignorant; the latter, stupid and irrational. For his part, Lavengro detests what he regards as the idolatry of Catholicism, the kind of faith that the man in black preaches. At the beginning of The Romany Rye, they have a lengthy dispute about religion that can be described as an argument about word versus body. The priest argues that images of the body of Christ are sufficient and necessary to sustain belief. Without a visual image, a tangible and imaginable body, there can be no worship. Indeed, the priest goes on, even the worship of secular saints, like Shakespeare, depends on bowing before an image: “Shakespeare’s works are not sufficient for you; no more are the Bible or the legend of Saint Anthony or Ignacio for us.… I tell you, Zingara [Italian for “Gypsy”], that no religion can exist long which rejects a good bodily image” (RR 11). For Lavengro, it is Shakespeare’s words and works that make him an immortal and Moses’s assault on idol worship that defines Christianity. He represents the priest’s argument as ultimately an elitist one, a lack of confidence in the ability of the people, the masses, the uneducated to grasp religious faith through language. Protestantism opposes Catholicism in The Romany Rye, as elsewhere, as a democratic Christianity of the Book against a tyrannical Christianity of the dictate. Borrow’s work for the British and Foreign Bible Society lies behind this dispute and behind his continuing vilification of Catholicism. As a distributor of the Bible, which the man in black refers to as “a vulgar book,” Borrow believed himself to be the opponent of oppression—and of Roman Catholicism (RR 23). The popularity of The Bible in Spain, his most successful book, rested in part on its championing of English Protestantism and celebration of the Word: “Where the Scriptures were read, neither priestcraft nor tyranny could long exist and instanced the case of my own country, the cause of whose freedom and prosperity was the Bible, and that only, as the last persecutor of this book, the bloody and infamous Mary, was the last tyrant on the throne of England.”³⁶ A book stands against not just ignorance but oppression and so has a political as well as a spiritual significance. Words have the power to liberate in a way that blurs the distinction between religious and secular, between the word of God and the words of Shakespeare and Defoe.

The identity of word master replaces both the surname that is never used in the narrative and the lineage that his parents themselves bequeath to him. It is worth emphasizing, however, that Lavengro never actually discovers a paternal or parental substitute or adopts an identity derived from any group or “race” to which he remains attracted—principally, of course, the Gypsies. Canny and honest enough to understand the distinction between playing at and becoming one of the Romany, he fleetingly and unsuccessfully aspires to initiate his own genealogy, with Belle as matriarch and America as land of Eden. The Oedipal drama stalls. He neither vanquishes the father, whose youthful pugilism and preference for Lavengro’s brother cast him firmly in the role of opponent, nor wins the mother, who clearly, if weakly, favors her less conventional son: “it is the way of women,” Lavengro’s father admonishes her, comparing her with the biblical Rebecca, “always to side with the second-born” (L 87). What he does discover, however, is a tongue that may be the “mother of all languages” and an adoptive brother, Jasper Petulengro, who reflects Lavengro’s own idiosyncrasies but possesses as well the physical strength to challenge the bullying father and rival the favored biological brother.

Lavengro’s older brother, the fair-haired, visibly English son who recalls his father when he fought the dusky Big Ben, is displaced—at least in the Romany rye’s affective universe—by Jasper and then dies prematurely. Perhaps the brother is vanquished in his father’s place, as a surrogate object for Lavengro’s Oedipal aggression. Nonetheless, this unresolved narrative of family romance or bildung seems consistent with the triumph of language and brotherhood as the particular ties that bind Lavengro to humankind. The vertical tensions of family romance are superseded by horizontal lines of association that emphasize neither inheritance nor reproduction. The masculine world of the picaresque tradition—of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, of Samuel Pickwick and Sam Weller—celebrates fraternity and eschews heterosexual domesticity. Borrow’s works follow this pattern, even by reproducing the cross-class nature of the picaro’s male companionship. As Herbert Sussman has pointed out in relation to the early Victorian “masculine plot,” in which the embrace of male community and rejection of the feminine offer the hero an alternative to the marriage plot, “closure is often ambiguous.”³⁷ The two end points of the Oedipal crisis, status (supplanting the father) and heterosexual union (finding a legitimate substitute for the mother), elude Lavengro. Instead, he ends by beginning to wander anew, propelled by the attraction of language and fraternity. His progeny will be more words and more languages; his kin, other brothers.

The centenary of George Borrow’s death was commemorated in the Times Literary Supplement in 1981 with a number of suggestive articles and reviews. Most striking among them was Andrew Motion’s account of a lecture about Borrow delivered at the Cheltenham Literary Festival by Enoch Powell, the Tory politician who combined extreme erudition with virulent xenophobia.³⁸ Motion, intrigued by Powell’s enthusiasm for the mostly forgotten writer, explained it in two ways. Predictably, Powell associated Borrow with the “pastoral past of … England,” a “golden age” that might never be discovered again, and with nostalgia for a rural and very English landscape. But Powell, born in 1912, also revealed that a revival of interest in Borrow had coincided with his youth and that he knew large chunks of the works by heart. “His enthusiasm,” Motion writes, “was initially of his father’s making: the family had caught the contemporary craze for walking expeditions—poking around the countryside ‘in semivagrant guise’—on which Borrow was an ideal guide.” A year later, Michael Mason, reviewing two recently published biographies of Borrow, did a brilliant job of identifying the contours of his intellectual obsessions and political stance: an abiding fascination with languages and Gypsies combined with an ambivalent and often apparently contradictory suspicion of political subversion, on the one hand, and strong anti-authoritarian impulses, on the other.³⁹ “There is more vacillation,” Mason concludes, “more Arnoldian ‘mental strife,’ in George Borrow than in George Eliot.” For Powell, Borrow’s rebelliousness remains invisible and his attraction to Romany life a matter of masquerade. For Mason, back-to-the-land nostalgia misses the point, and Borrow’s interest in Gypsies and their language bespeaks an unsettled and complex relationship to modern life.

These late-twentieth-century views of Borrow suggest the volatile nature of the history of his reception and make clear his contested status as both a deeply conservative and a radically unconventional character and writer. This history, which pivots on a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century revival and recreation of the early Victorian Borrow as a backward-looking and antimodern figure, also exemplifies the evolution of British literary and intellectual interest in Gypsies. Powell was born during this revival, generally a period of pastoral nostalgia, and as a child participated in its rituals of masquerade and playacting. The same rituals, however, were also associated with a sensibility of bohemian escapism and disdain for the strictures of bourgeois life—a sensibility shared, as we shall see, by members of the Gypsy Lore Society and antithetical to the socially and politically conservative views of the likes of the adult Enoch Powell. Projected onto the complicated figure of Borrow, a Gypsy scholar of an earlier era and a different stripe, these turn-of-the-century longings for a premodern England refashioned and distorted his work and his beliefs. He became a proxy for ideologically charged debates about what Englishness, or England’s past, might really signify. By 1981, Powell’s enthusiasm for Borrow had taken on yet another layer of nostalgia—for his own youth—and had purged Borrow of his fondness for just those aspects of Britishness that Powell reviled: cultural variation and eclecticism.

We arrive at a more complex and nuanced view of Borrow’s peculiar political identity, a sense of his Arnoldian vacillation and “mental strife,” through his attachment to the Gypsies and their language and his invention of the persona of the Romany rye. As with Walter Scott and Matthew Arnold, Borrow’s psychic and aesthetic involvement with the Gypsies turns in large part on questions of change and changelessness, as well as on a sense of identification, however fleeting, with the Gypsies’ marginality, homelessness, and sometimes willed, sometimes enforced wandering. What distinguishes Borrow’s fascination with the Romany from Scott’s, Arnold’s, or even John Clare’s, however, are his linguistic obsession and the greater intimacy with Gypsy life this affords him. He neither makes a fetish of their allegedly primitive way of life nor romanticizes their pristine associations with an older, rural Englishness. Like Scott, and like the Arnold of “Resignation,” he recognizes that the Gypsies of his own historical moment—in his case the 1820s—have been subjected to the alterations of time and assimilation.

Lavengro comments on the frequency of marriages between “gorgios [non-Gypsies] and Romany chies [women]” and the mixed progeny, called “half and half,” that are the result (RR 68). Jasper concedes that his wife is “fond of Frenchmen and French discourse” and aspires to the state of “gentility” that may ultimately destroy gypsyism for good (RR 79). Lavengro’s interest in the Gypsies’ language gives him another way of apprehending the transformation of their culture. Unlike the later Gypsy lorists, who would comb the north of England and Wales in search of “pure” Gypsies who spoke an unadulterated Romani, Lavengro places this myth of Gypsy purity many centuries in the past. His pastoralism is complicated, then, by a sense that the Gypsies are already a mixed group and an attenuated version of “the old stock” (RR 82). He speculates on the strangeness, peculiarity, vast knowledge of secrets, and “more perfect” language he might have encountered had he lived among Gypsies two or three centuries earlier. The myth of Gypsy changelessness, which, I have argued, finds its mid-nineteenth-century avatar in Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy,” never seems credible in Lavengro and The Romany Rye. The railroad may be a threat to the survival of the Romany, but that is precisely because they are not outside history, not phantoms untouched by change.

The greatest threat to gypsyism, according to Borrow, is the press of gentility, by which he means the Englishman’s aspiration to rise in society by parroting—in a manner that amounts to parody—the ways of a more privileged class. He anatomizes the foibles of each social class. The aristocracy, sometime admirers of the emperors of Austria and Russia, aspire to an imperial or military model of gentility, with “flaming epaulets, a cocked hat, and plumes.” The middle classes mimic aristocratic ways. And the lower classes find their “beau ideal” in railroad contactors (RR 330–31). The end result of this tyranny of gentility will be the erasure of difference, distinctness of character, and authenticity, and its greatest casualties will be those religious and ethnic minorities whose idiosyncrasies make them especially appealing to Borrow/Lavengro: Gypsies, Jews, and Quakers. Wealthy Jews, he reports, already forsake the synagogue for the opera house, and they abandon their ancient texts—Mishnah, Gemara, and Zohar—for silver-fork novels like Benjamin Disraeli’s The Young Duke (1831) (RR 343). Gypsies, he continues, risk becoming the irresponsible people many already believe them to be: the women may indeed become harlots and the men, careless husbands and fathers. They will try to pass as Christians, spouting the accepted political and religious beliefs of the day, only to be ridiculed and rejected because of their poverty. Quakers, like Jews and Gypsies, will seek after intermarriage, conversion, and fakery and, because of their relative wealth and physical indistinctiveness, be accepted and absorbed by the genteel majority.

There is a Carlylean strain of antidandiacal fervor in Borrow’s assault on gentility, but its purpose is quite different. In Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), Thomas Carlyle assaults the do-nothingism and lack of productivity of foppish aristocrats and their middle-class mimics, whereas Borrow particularly resents the homogenizing effects of a mock-aristocratic culture. In a twist unlikely to be found outside Borrow’s profoundly anticlerical and anti-Catholic universe, he also associates the brand of gentility he reviles with Catholicism, Gothicism, and the priest of Lavengro, the “man in black.” Into the mouth of the priest he inserts an expression of delight that the English, who have always prized a “plain and simple religion,” might now quit Protestantism for the more genteel religion of Rome, “with which Templars, Hospitalers, mitres, abbots, Gothic abbeys, long-drawn aisles, golden censers, incense, et cetera, are connected” (RR 344). Whereas the antidandiacal Carlyle sees in the Gothic abbey a model of serious fellowship and communal labor, Borrow sees a symbol of Catholic opulence, sensuality, and mystification.

Often associated with Toryism because of his jaundiced view of modernity and his clear skepticism about Whiggery, Borrow’s clearest political affinities are Radical and republican, and he expatiates quixotically and at some length on the “real Radicals” of the Cato Street Conspiracy: Arthur Thistlewood and James Ings. Enraged by the state’s assault in 1819 on workingmen in Manchester at St. Peter’s Fields and influenced by Jacobin ideas and other forms of republicanism, the Cato Street group plotted to overthrow the government and assassinate members of the cabinet.⁴⁰ To Borrow, these men, who were hanged for high treason in 1820, were true radicals, unlike the “humbugs” of a later time who only “jobbed and traded in Republicanism” (RR 378). “Oh, there was something in these fellows! honesty and courage,” he writes of Ings and Thistlewood, despairing of finding any authentic facsimiles in his own day. Demonstrating once again that he was formed by, and perhaps stalled in, the 1820s, Borrow casts a critical eye on the reformers of 1832 and all the Whigs of the present moment. Although not a consistent or even an especially logical political thinker, Borrow was not the “staunch conservative” and rural escapist that George Saintsbury, Leslie Stephen, and Enoch Powell believed him to be.

Borrow’s awareness that the British Romany he encountered were subject to change and the forces of history distinguishes him from those who persisted in regarding the Gypsies as frozen in time, an indelible reminder of a forgotten age. He is also able to express some skepticism about his own position as Gypsy fellow traveler and writes into the narrative of Lavengro an indication that he understands the limitations of the role. Powell’s boyhood outings in the guise of a vagrant, a custom of the early decades of the twentieth century that his father enjoyed, suggests something of the morally suspect habit of identity masquerade. The taint of “slumming,” of a patronizing appropriation of the garb and habits of a socially marginal and culturally distinct group, haunts the narrative of Lavengro even as it colors more thoroughly the holiday disguise of the Powells. Borrow signals his attentiveness to this pose at a number of points, certainly when Lavengro comments that it is easy to play at being a Gypsy and not so straightforward to become one and when he leaves his temporary Gypsy camp in Mumper’s Dingle. But it is the episode of Mrs. Herne and the poisoned cake that most powerfully, if obliquely, communicates Borrow’s critique of his protagonist’s pose.

Mrs. Herne, the mother-in-law of Jasper, is alone among the Petulengro kin in taking a dislike to Lavengro and leaves for Yorkshire to get away from him (figure 13). “I hates the gorgio,” she tells her daughter, “and would like, speaking Romanly, to mix a little poison with his waters.” She would rather part from her family than remain near the Romany rye, she continues, so “to gain a bad brother, ye have lost a good mother” (L 108). But although she leaves, she plots against him. Many chapters later, a young Romany girl appears before Lavengro, dancing and singing seductively in a virtual caricature of a sexually enticing Gypsy woman, and feeds him a rich cake. After becoming deathly ill from the cake, Lavengro realizes that he has been poisoned, and Mrs. Herne arrives to tell him why she has plotted his death: “Halloo, tinker! you must introduce yourself into a quiet family and raise confusion.… You must steal its language, and, what was never done before, write it down Christianly” (L 389). Putting it more graphically some pages later, Mrs. Herne accuses Lavengro of stealing “the tongue out of her head” (L 397). Guilty not only of masquerade, Lavengro also commits the offense of the ethnologist or philologist. He appropriates the Romany’s language, the very thing that attracts him to them most powerfully, and translates it into a “Christian” form. The story does not end here. Lavengro’s ability to survive the poisoning, together with Mrs. Herne’s conviction that his recovery has fulfilled a terrible dream of hers, sends the woman into deep despondency, and she hangs herself in despair. At this point, Jasper, who gained a brother at the expense of a mother-in-law, must demonstrate his loyalty to his kin and make a show of punishing Lavengro. The Gypsy challenges the górgio to a boxing match, recalling Lavengro’s father’s contest with Big Ben, and beats him handily, drawing Lavengro’s blood but harming him very little. Now, this ritual of revenge and masculine rivalry out of the way, Lavengro can truly be embraced. Jasper offers Lavengro the hand of Ursula, his sister-in-law and Mrs. Herne’s other daughter, and invites him to settle down with them. It is as though, after public acknowledgment of his transgressions, linguistic and otherwise, Lavengro can be accepted as a rye, with all the moral ambiguities that position implies.

The story of Mrs. Herne invites us to conclude that Lavengro’s narrative is, in fact, about himself, rather than about the Gypsies to whom he is attracted. Because of their social marginality, their exotic language, and their associations with a pastoral way of life for which Lavengro longs, Gypsies enable George Borrow to tell the story of a marginal man whose identity and desire are constituted around language. Their habitual status as peripheral figures in the cultural imagination and in literary texts also suits Borrow’s purposes in creating works of indeterminate form and inconclusive structure. As with most nineteenth-century writers who were drawn to the subject of Gypsies, however, Borrow’s personal identification with the Romany is inseparable from his serious interest in their language, history, and global ubiquity. And if his identification verges on solipsism, it is accompanied by a commitment—both political and aesthetic—to the preservation of Gypsy identity, not for the sake of nostalgia or some notion of cultural purity but in the interests of cultural heterogeneity and multifarious Englishness. His lifelong interest in Gypsies was of a piece with his opposition to “gentility,” the enemy of difference, and with his radical, if inconsistent, political sympathies.